


Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

by persnickett



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Community: sexy_right, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 06:15:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And there he is, sweet young Matthew. Still lithe and whip-thin in jeans and sneakers, still with all the audacity of a fucking tom-cat. The blazing sun is playing over that head of dark, lustrous hair… and the muzzle of the weapon pointed right at John’s chest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Notable Quotables challenge at LJ's sexy_right.

“Hands in the air, old man.”

John would know that voice anywhere. He’s known it pitched and thready with panic. He’s heard it bright and brassy with laughter, flaring with righteous passions, and broken with grief. He’s known it low and sordid between his sheets, muttering filthy-sweet promises into his skin in the dark.

The voice, he knows. Why the kid has tracked him down all the way out here is another matter altogether.

It would be a lie if John said he’d seen this coming. Maybe that’s what makes it burn, just a little. Out here in the open, in broad daylight, and a kid who was still in diapers the day he made Detective got the drop on him.

It’d be a shame to think he was going soft in his retirement.

One eyebrow climbs skyward, but it’s the only reaction John gives. He lets the cicadas’ song buzz through the shimmering air a second longer, lets the relentless noonday sun beat down on their backs a moment – lets the kid sweat.

His garden shears were just sharpened this morning. He snaps them shut, feels the blades sink through the woody young flesh of the sapling’s branch and come together with a smooth, satisfying _snick_. He turns.

And there he is, sweet young Matthew. Still lithe and whip-thin in jeans and sneakers, still with all the audacity of a fucking tom-cat. The blazing sun is playing over that head of dark, lustrous hair… and the muzzle of the weapon pointed right at John’s chest.

He looks up, meeting the familiar brown eyes. Matt doesn’t squeeze one eye shut when he approaches a target anymore, he’s got them both wide, staying alert for surprise attacks and keeping his depth perception intact in case one turns up. His feet are planted a shoulder width apart, knees properly unlocked and ready to move; a perfect stance all the way up to the relaxed posture in those narrow shoulders, and the steady, two-handed grip. Just like John taught him.

“Drop it,” Matt grunts, with a twitch of the gun in his hands in the direction of John’s shears.

John does, and shows him his hands. Then he grins wolfishly, shows him all his teeth too.

“Now,” he says, low, taking a step toward him. **“I don’t wanna kill you. And you don’t wanna be dead.”**

There was a time a threat like that would have cowed the kid, had him backing off a step or two before he’d even realized his feet had moved. Now, Matt takes a single step forward instead. He returns John’s toothy smile.

Not for the first time, John thinks maybe it had been a mistake, training him.

“That’s some pretty big talk coming from the guy without a gun.”

But there was one move John hadn’t shown him yet.

It’s a mere two strides forward between them now, before John can bring his hand down on top of Matthew’s – nothing more than a set of quick, distinct movements when you know how. A chop for impact, a yank to unbalance, a twist-and-wrench to dislodge. The real trick is just not to drop it.

“I wouldn’t say that,” John answers, when he straightens up, settling Matt’s gun in his left hand and taking aim.

“God I love watching you do that.” Matt’s smile has gone soft and admiring now, and his posture is his own again, slightly slouching, just-this-side-of gawky, and sweetly unsure.

He’s got his offended gun-hand cradled in the palm of the other, but it doesn’t stop him from lowering them both to nudge surreptitiously against the crotch of his jeans.

“Hands in the air, kid,” John says, drily.

“I—Okay,” Matt stammers, but he obeys, hands moving into the air, and feet tangling awkwardly with each other as he starts to retreat backward.

“Freeze,” John growls.

Matt stops moving and rolls his eyes.

“It’s a _water pistol_ , John. Let’s not get extra crazy with the role play here.” But his tone is still uncertain, hands still raised, and John just smiles mildly, keeps up his slow, painstaking advance. “So, okay, could you stop being terrifying for one second and— oh, _shit_.”

And they’re off. Matt drops his hands, turns tail, and starts across the lawn at a loping pace.

“Gonna have to move faster than that!” John calls, taking off after him.

He’d have had him, definitely, if Matt hadn’t had the good sense to head for the corner of the yard instead of taking the full diagonal stretch toward the house, and get the birdbath between them – the huge, goddamn concrete, eyesore of a birdbath, that was here when they’d bought the place. Replacing it had been on John’s To Do list for what was probably too long, now. One thing moving out of the city had taught him, was that people who had lawns made a habit of putting the weirdest shit all over them.

John still wasn’t sure he got it, the clutter. Wasn’t the _space_ out here the whole point? Space for letting your grandkids run around in, and for burning perfectly good steaks on a barbecue that made too much damn smoke, until the neighbours complained and you had to ply them with beer and home-baked brownies to make up for it. Space for…well for this, apparently.

They circle the birdbath with its obnoxious cast cement squirrel-and-bluebird design once, and then twice; Matt grinning and cursing the entire time – in between advising him to seek therapy for several sets of deep-seated issues. John just works on keeping his ‘gun’ raised, and his brows lowered, giving the act his best predatory leer and waiting, waiting for Matt to make his move.

He loses a few paces of ground when Matt finally bolts for it. He’s moving faster this time, and John starts to think he might actually just clear the sanctuary of the back porch. But in a moment like this John likes to remind himself what his high school football coach used to say: if you can touch it, you can catch it. He gets a hand out, tangling haphazardly in the back of Matt’s t-shirt, and the quarterback is toast.

It’s a bit of a jar to his right knee as they go down in the springy, overgrown grass – getting the mowing done has been on John’s To Do list, too – and Matt takes note. John can tell by the way he sets his weight to the right as he bucks upward and back with his hips. It throws him off balance for not more than a second, but it’s enough. Matt takes advantage of John’s loss of leverage to push up into the direction of the tackle and roll onto his back, both hands now free and ready to take the fight to anybody who might be looking for one.

“Not bad,” John pants, a little winded, and maybe more than a little proud of the effects of his efforts in making sure Matt could take care of himself.

“Did you even _have_ a childhood?” Matt grouses, equally breathless. “Are you so un-versed in the laws of the great American tradition of the water-fight, that you can’t just go get the hose like a normal person?” Matt stops giving him hell, if only to gasp for breath, and puts an arm across his chest, rubbing at his elbow. “Also, _ow_ ,” he adds, accusingly.

But John still has his weapon in hand, and he aims it right between Matt’s bushy eyebrows. “So it’s a fight, you want, huh?”

“Go ahead,” Matt rasps, narrowing his eyes Eastwood-style, the effect only slightly ruined by his allegedly-asthmatic struggle to catch his breath. “Make my day.” Then he ruins it the rest of the way, by giving a suggestive wiggle of those heavy brows. And then of his hips. “It’s going to take more than a little squirt to put out this fire, cowboy.”

John feels a reluctant smirk tugging at his lips. Matt’s pickup lines are one thing that hasn’t improved under his influence.

“I’ll give you a ‘little squirt’,” he fires back, bearing down with his thighs and pinning Matt still.

“Only a little one?” Matt pouts, satirically. He gives another lewd little wriggle that makes things brush up against other things where their hips are now pressed tightly together at an angle that’s just starting to get interesting.

But Matt’s bedroom banter is getting worse by the second. Just for that, John points his pistol in the direction of all Matt’s ridiculous innuendo, and pulls the trigger.

Nothing happens.

“Ooooops. No bullets,” Matt drawls, drily. In more ways than one. “Did you think I was stupid?”

That finally does it. John lets loose with a crack of laughter, and Matt grins triumphantly underneath him. He doesn’t even remember teaching Matt this particular move.

“I do listen when you talk you know,” Matt is saying smugly, bringing both hands up into a cradle behind his head in the grass. “Lesson number one, know your strengths.” Matt lifts his head a moment, in order to free up one hand and tap at his temple. “Brains versus brawn. I knew I couldn’t take you hand to hand.” He smiles, a bit of a softer, faraway quality to it now. “You were always going to be able to turn it around on me.”

John looks at the little plastic gun in his hand a little wonderingly. Empty, this entire time.

“You really do like watching me do that, huh.”

“Oh god, you can’t tell?” Matt scoffs, with another little prod of his hips up into John’s own. “Apparently I like watching you do yard work, too. Lots of bending over,” he points out, reverently. “And lifting. With muscles.”

John sighs, and shakes his head disbelievingly. He wipes at a bead of sweat he can feel trickling down over the curve of his forehead toward his eyes.

The cicadas are still filling the sweltering air with their sizzling mating song, and the sun is still baking down on them from the top of its arc in the sky, starting to draw the sweat from both of their skins, now. John has a back-breaking Honey-Do list of gardening chores and handy-man jobs that seems to get a little bit longer, instead of shorter, each and every day since they’ve been here, and a kid who was still in diapers the day he made Detective wanting to fucking play cops and robbers.

How’d he get so damn _lucky_?

John leans down and kisses him. He kisses him again, and he doesn’t stop until Matt is pressing the entire length of himself against him, sticky and humid in the ticklish-rough grass; until his fingers are unlaced from behind his head and sliding, greasy and slick, up over the sweat-slippery dome of his shorn scalp and pulling John down against his mouth instead.

And then he still doesn’t stop. He’s reeling with it, suddenly, this mundane marvel. Staggering under the weight of this every day miracle that has somehow become his life. His breath is coming hard and fast; breathing into Matt’s mouth like he wants to inhale him, take in every drop of everything he is, everything that he makes John into, just by being at his side. And his heart isn’t so much racing as sort of… _soaring_ , and he thinks if he died of a heart attack, right the fuck now, there couldn’t be a better way to go.

He is definitely going soft in his retirement.

“So you wanna tell me where you were planning on running off to?” John asks huskily, when he remembers that they’re outside. More or less in public. And the neighbours would have to get sick of brownies sometime.

Matt licks his lips, blinks slate-pupiled eyes. “Is this turning into a sparring lesson because I was kinda hoping…”

John points his now obviously empty water gun back down at his target.

“Sparring lesson,” Matt sighs, slumping back into the lawn and completely missing the direction of John’s aim. “Fine, busted. I didn’t have an escape plan. And please note my extreme self-control in not pointing out the unbridled hypocrisy of a man whose definition of a plan includes ‘find Lucy, kill everyone else’ constantly insisting that I have a better one every time I leave the house? Nothing ever happens here, it’s like we pretty much retired to Mayberry, and technically, _technically_ John, I haven’t even left the yard.”

“Noted.” John might have to try harder to get his point across. He presses the nose of the gun to the seam of Matt’s fly.

“Appreciated,” Matt replies. John slides the little pistol northward, makes for the button on Matt’s waistband. “I guess I was just heading for the h—aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, bedroom!” Matt exclaims, catching on and nodding emphatically as the button pops free. “I was headed for the bedroom.”

“Five second head start,” John allows, easing some of weight off Matt’s hips and leaning back a little. “And if you’re smart you’ll have these clothes off, unless you want them ruined when I get up there.”

“Five seconds,” Matt scoffs, wriggling his way free – and right out of his pants in the process. Apparently, he’d already managed to toe off his sneakers while he had John distracted. Maybe there are still a few moves Matt hasn’t taught him yet, either. “I barely need three.”

John gathers up Matt’s abandoned clothing, dusts the grass clippings from his knees, and watches Matt go – all youth and hormones and skinny legs, streaking across the lawn in just his skivvies and a pair of bright white socks, neighbours’ sensibilities and brownies be damned.

He can have all five seconds. John has a stop to make.

There’s an old set of hand cuffs rattling around in the bottom of a drawer somewhere up on the third floor, and if Matt wants to be playing games, then John can think of a couple more that could be a lot more fun.

 

~


End file.
